So, the California Community College’s Chancellor’s office, through its Online Education Initiative, is offering the Canvas LMS free to all colleges. There is a catch – if you adopt Canvas this way, your college is not allowed to use any other LMS. It’s a Canvas contract. A Mafia-style, old-fashioned, arm-twisting contract.
Faculty and other “stake holders” have made the decision to recommend Canvas, which surprises me exactly not at all. I spent useless hours on the survey offering my input, very shortly before the report came out justifying the changeover. I had chosen not to be on the committee that decided this (not that I was asked, you understand) because my forehead is already flat from banging it against walls.
So it’s time to learn to use Canvas. Yes, the instructor who wrote about the Insidious Pedagogy of the LMS will now be forced to change to an LMS with fewer features, options and control than the one I’m using. I can hear Alan Levine in the back of my head saying, “But Lisa, you only use the LMS solum pro procuratio“! Yes, I know. However, when you live in the same house a long time, your stuff builds up. You customize things for you. You move the hinge to the other side of the fridge, and cover up that gap in the floorboards with a pretty rug. After awhile you can move through the rooms at night with the lights off.
So I already know one thing – my pedagogy for my primary sources, the one I’ve published about, the main constructivist part of my class, won’t work in Canvas the way it has in Moodle. Like Blackboard (our other wonderful option), Canvas has “rubrics”, but neither lets you rate or grade a full screen of posts at once, as I do with Moodle’s dropdown ratings. Instead, it’s multiple clicks to grade each post.
I have tried every feature in Canvas (and Blackboard) to make sure I can’t do this in a similar way. I am using Moodle ratings rather than grades or rubrics – that’s what makes it simple. They translate automatically into percentage grades. And you can’t use ratings in Canvas or Blackboard like that – neither system allows instructor-only ratings
So up to now, I’ve been grading, with relative ease, about 35 
posts per week x 7 classes. I will simply not be able to grade 245 posts one at a time every Thursday in Canvas. They’ll have to put me away.
Similarly, all the writing assignments have been graded on an open forum with drop-down ratings. ->
No can do.
So, the list of Canvas shortcomings compared to Moodle continues (please, if you know different, correct me!):
- The course menu is very difficult to change, with strict limitations.
- QTI format is required to import quizzes (Moodle had multiple formats – my zillions of quizzes are in Aiken).
- Quiz questions are worth a minimum of one point each, and all quiz questions must be worth the same points. You cannot have a quiz with 20 questions worth 10 points.
- Opening another tab for an open book exam is not possible.
- Video is limited to YouTube unless you upload the whole file.
- Viewing external pages within the LMS frame is only possible with SSL pages (and sometimes that doesn’t work).
- Most tools are outside the LMS with vendors who may or may not be there later.
- There is no capability to make a popup message for students when they log in.
- There is no shoutbox (I use this as a quick forum on the front page with students).
- There are no branched lessons, just forced pathways.
- The only rating is “like”.
- No Javascript is allowed (for security – theirs, not mine).
- No iframes are allowed (more security – please remove your shoes before boarding the plane).
The pedagogy will have to shift to accommodate the limitations of the technology. I hate that. And I’ll need a screwdriver for the door on the fridge…
I just saw this post pop up in my RSS, Lisa… but I recognized the bumper sticker ha ha.
We are about to switch from 10 years of D2L (which I loathe) to Canvas. Not that I really care at this point because my use really is UT MINIME, as little as possible.
Reading your list of woes here is really depressing. I would have expected better of Canvas because these all sound like perfectly nice things to be able to do.
… and NO IFRAMES???????????
OMG. There go my hopes of using Canvas as a space that could be enlivened with stuff from the real world.
Anyway, I will follow your Canvas adventures with great interest. We are just getting started, and I am going to be trying (and probably failing) get some people at my school to discuss these things in public at Twitter. The leader of our LMS change group (director of our teaching center) designated a hashtag #OU_LMS16 which I am using faithfully and Storifying every week. I will go share your post now with our hashtag. The devil’s in the details…
Yes, I wondered whether that was your LMS shift too! We will help each other. I have some ideas already that I’m writing in my next post…
Keep in mind it’s totally possible that I’m wrong! The Canvas whitelist at https://s3.amazonaws.com/tr-learncanvas/docs/Canvas_HTML_Whitelist.pdf says iframes are ok for some things. It’s possible I couldn’t do it because I don’t know what I’m doing yet, having spend all of three days with Canvas. It’s also possible that I just don’t know enough about iframes!
Also, the workaround I’m using for the iframes is the Redirect Tool combined with making sure the page I want is SSL. More soon…
I had some SSL woes with using my blog as my homepage in D2L: Blogger didn’t have SSL until midway through the Fall semester (and D2L started blocking mixed content for us in Fall), but now there is Blogger SSL so that problem at least is solved. One of my javascript widgets does not work in the blog sidebar inside D2L (I need to move the javascript to an SSL address which I guess I can set up in Reclaim Hosting now, so I’ll learn how to do that this summer)… and one of the reasons I’ve used Blogger and PBWorks for so long is exactly because they are super-javascript-friendly.
Anyway, I will be really glad to learn from your experience and I promise to share back any promising bits of Canvas knowledge I acquire, as I would like to educate myself about it, even though I am going to stick to UT MINIME as my philosophy. It has served me well through a decade of D2L.
Signing off for the night here on east coast, but thanks again for these posts. It is so nice of you to write things up like this!
Good Morning, Lisa
I want to encourage you to participate in the activities of the OEI in collaborating to share effective online teaching practices that go beyond the course management tools of Canvas. There have been many opportunities to do just that both in the selection and the implementation of OEI resources. We have a wide variety of ways to learn Canvas from facilitated online courses to just-in-time resources about functionality.
I also want to dispel the myth that we are forcing the change to Canvas and making colleges choose one system (a la your Mafia reference). If a college wants more than one, they just have to pay for Canvas themselves using our negotiated pricing, which is a good pricing deal. You can imagine what would happen if we didn’t do that. Colleges would not be serious about working together and would have just taken Canvas on in addition to their other tool(s) making both the system-wide collaboration and cost negotiations impossible. Additionally, in order to show that there is value in the system paying for a CMS as infrastructure, a savings must be part of the benefit. We stand to save the CCC system over 8 million dollars per year through the purchasing done via the economy of scale involved and help solidify ongoing support of all of the resources being offered by the OEI. You are encouraged to use the ASCCC recent resolution about shifting current local CMS cost savings to supporting faculty development, as well.
One of the 60 member selection committee’s main goals was to find a company to work with that would be a partner. Instructure has done that. They are willing to listen to the changes we ask for and have made many since we selected them in February of 2014. There is a community within the system that allows you to request features and vote them up, giving Instructure clear direction about product improvement. If you wish to request some functionality be added, please join the community and request them. I have provided the community link below. The contract we have negotiated also includes 24/7 help desk support for both faculty and students in the use of Canvas.
Collaborating as a system around online teaching and learning has been amazing and all of the resources we have been testing and procuring have added to the ability of colleges to actually have well resourced online programs.
In addition,faculty members are actually impressed with the ease of use of the Canvas and are taking the opportunity to refresh their courses, which is something, as you know, should happen regularly, as well. We also provide a multitude of opportunities to learn to use the tools, which some say are easier to learn than they imagined.
Please visit http://ccconlineed.org for more information about what’s available. There’s also an article in the Tech Edge newsletter about a college’s recent experience that you may find useful http://ccctechedge.org/news/660-non-pilot-college-employs-oei-resources
When we chose Canvas, we had students involved and they were very strong voice in the decision making. Our goal is to do what is best for students and it remains at the heart of our work.
I welcome you to email me with any additional questions or concerns you may have around system-wide Canvas adoption or the other resources we are offering.
Community Link: http://ccconlineed.org/technology-resources/canvas-ccms/canvas-community/
Resources to learn Canvas: http://ccconlineed.org/technology-resources/canvas-ccms/canvas-resources-for-faculty/
Patricia James
Executive Director
CCC Online Education Initiative
pjames@ccconlineed.org
Hi Pat,
Thank you so much for the clarification. I recall how excited I was when it got around that OEI was going to build their own LMS (I put in some input about features at that time), and how disappointed that a commercial product like Canvas would be used instead. I do understand the financial arrangement for going independently with Canvas, and I also understand the economic considerations for the change. I have read all your announcements at OEI and am aware of the campaign to demonstrate the simplicity and usefulness of this LMS. I understand that many faculty, students and administrators, are, and will be, happy working within this simpler system. I understand that OEI folks are completely sincere in their efforts to save community colleges money and form links among the colleges, and how many people have been part of the process. I am up-to-date on training opportunities and professional development options.
I am also aware these processes are likely to support trends toward standardization of classes, which I am against. I suspect that power users of LMSs, and of online systems in general for education, may be (as I am) far less enthusiastic about a system that allows so little independence on the part of the faculty member. “What’s best for students” is what everyone wants, including me. For me to be the best online teacher I can be, I would prefer a system that supports the pedagogy I choose to develop. However, I will do everything I can to assist faculty in developing their own pedagogical goals within this system. I am familiar with the Canvas community, where the list of requested features includes features I have used for years – certainly I expect future develop that answers the needs of the largest number of faculty. Philosophically, I do believe that if a statewide system is necessary (and I’ve never been sure that it is), that it should be non-commercial and free, regardless of which technologies colleges choose to use. I regret the pedagogical freedom lost in the process. And I remain disappointed that this system seems to be so limited, while at the same time hoping I’m wrong and that there is complexity I have not discovered.
What I share here is only one person’s experience with working with Canvas, and I only hope it will be useful to others.
Hi Lisa,
I’m with you on not wanting cookie-cutter classes. I think what we bring, individually, to our teaching is incredibly important. I also know that some design considerations, like those offered in our Course Design Standards, are important to guide people while they are building their class structure. Don’t we all wish for the system that we have in our heads! I am encouraged, however, by the willingness of Instrucure to listen to us. Building our own system was time and cost prohibitive, unfortunately. I hope you will participate in the critique and creation of new functionality in Canvas and with other design processes as we move forward for our students.
Pat